Longtime Columbus DJ and all around rock n roll aficionado Archie invited me down to the Q-FM-96 studios to be a guest on his kick ass Vinyl Analysis podcast. The conversation started with Cheap Trick's Standing on the Edge record but eventually moved onto other rock related subjects. I had a blast and big thanks to Archie for having me on with him. - Colin G.
Colin and Friends Playing Tom Petty this Thursday at Four String Taproom @ 9pm - FREE
This fall, Colin has been playing a residency at the Four String Taproom (985 W. 6th) in Grandview. He plays one solo set every Thursday starting around 9 pm. There is no cover charge. This week he and some of his pals will be performing all Tom Petty tunes and the taproom will be blasting plenty of Petty before and after the show. So Thursday October 5th, stop by the Four String Taproom to toast the great Tom Petty. Doors 8pm. Colin on at 9pm. Over by 11.
Music, Memories and Shootings - by Anne Marie
I heard about the Vegas mass shooting this morning. As I lay in bed, having hit the snooze button, fighting to drag myself to full consciousness and willing my eyes to remain open, my daughter Caitlin knocked on my door asking whether I had heard about the shooter at the Jason Aldean concert during the Route 91 Harvest Festival, a three-day country music event in Las Vegas. Her quick recitation of the tragic toll exacted by the lone gunman - more than 50 dead and more than 500 injured - instantly brought me fully awake, my heart pounding. And now, although I’ve stayed mostly away from the relentless, repetitive news reports, I’ve thought about it all morning.
I have since learned that the death toll, currently confirmed at 58 as I write this Monday afternoon, makes this the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. I have learned that it is likely that the weapon used was a submachine gun. I could dwell on how I think there must be a way of imposing reasonable restraints on the availability of such weapons without infringing on anyone’s ability to hunt or defend one’s person or home, but that is not where my thoughts go today. Instead, I just keep thinking how much it sucks that these lunatics choose music venues in which to carry out terrorist acts, revenge fantasies or whatever other vendetta consume their individual and collectively unbalanced minds.
I keep thinking about the Paris concert attack at the Bataclan back in November 2015 and the wave of memories that attack loosed in me of a much smaller but still very tragic event in a small Boston club decades earlier. One thing I and many others who have observed gun violence up close and personal know is that a shooting does not have to be a mass shooting to be tragic. Here’s my memories of that event of July 30, 1987, as recalled back on November 15, 2015 following the Bataclan attack:
It wasn’t until Sunday morning that I first caught a glimpse of the footage of the shootings at the rock concert in Paris on Friday night. My immediate thought was that’s exactly how it happens. I registered the familiarity of the scene, an unsettling sense of déjà vu, but did not dwell on it. I was in the middle of doing something and did not want to get sucked into the 24/7 news coverage or my distant memories. So I kept walking and moved on with my task at hand.
But then, last night, I was reading the New Yorker online. After two articles focused on the ISIS attacks, I was tapped out on tragedy. I scrolled down through all the stories until a picture of a young Tom Petty caught my eye. My sister and I have shared a love of Tom Petty going back to the late 1970s so I immediately opened the related article focused on how Warren Zanes of the 1980s Boston rock band the Del Fuegos came to write Petty’s life story.
The Del Fuegos opened for Tom Petty during his tour for his 1987 album, “Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough)”. I was attending Boston University at the time and had managed to see the Del Fuegos live at The Rathskeller (known as The Rat and where you had to brave cat-sized rats to make your way in the door), a dive of a music venue right on Commonwealth Avenue in Kenmore Square near the heart of BU’s campus.
In the summer of 1987, between my junior and senior years, I lived with my BU roommate, Lisa, and a music student, Dave, we found from the Berklee School of Music to split the rent and take the tiny extra bedroom off the kitchen in our apartment in the student slum of Allston. Dave brought a fantastic cast of musical characters into our world – the perfect diversion as Lisa studied to take the MCAT and I prepped for the LSAT.
A number of Dave’s friends were bouncers and bartenders at Bunratty’s, a bar and music venue on Harvard Avenue right around the corner from our apartment, and Lisa and I would go over to hang out and catch some bands.
On the night of Friday, July 31, 1987, Bunratty’s was packed and outrageously loud. At some point late in the night, one of the guys came up to tell me and Lisa that they’d had to throw out a customer who’d been harassing and blocking the way of the band as it tried to set up. But then that was forgotten as the band started playing and Lisa and I pushed our way up close to the stage.
What happened next in the early morning hours of August 1st is hazy and surrealistic and literally has always played out in my memory (those few times I let it) in slow motion. At some point, I became aware of a commotion behind us, then of multiple loud pops and hot air swooshing past. I remember Lisa pulling me to the ground, yelling it’s shooting, bullets. But I’m really hazy on the events after that. I still don’t know exactly how we made our way out of there, at what point I realized our friend Abel Harris, a bouncer, had been shot, and when I learned the further details that Abel had been shot in the head at close range after he jumped over the bar and, with his hands held up in a surrender fashion, attempted to “talk down” the crazed gunman who had returned to the bar some two hours after he was first thrown out.
Abel died nine days later while hospitalized. That week, there were a series of benefit concerts for him at Bunratty’s and Metro. We were there for the two shows at Bunratty’s and were pressed up against the stage for the closing act, the Del Fuegos.
I guess it’s not surprising that the footage of the Paris rock concert attack could unloose this flood of memories from 30 years ago. It’s certainly brought the events in France into even starker focus for me and my heart goes out not only to the victims and their families but also to the survivors who will have that night live in the recesses of their memories forever.
And now there's Las Vegas to add to this list: so much music, so many memories, too many shootings.
AML
Bruce Springsteen Finally Breaks Down and Gets a Steady Job - by Ricki C.
(Official Pencilstorm Disclaimer: We have no definitive way to prove it - other than the fact that Ricki C. sent out previews to a couple of his close friends - but Ricki penned this piece in late August. On September 27th Jon Pareles published a story entitled Bruce Springsteen On Broadway: The Boss On His 'First Real Job.' in the New York Times. This either proves that great minds think alike, or that the Pencilstorm editors should run Ricki's blogs right when he finishes them, rather than a month later.)
On October 3rd, 2017 Bruce Springsteen will commence a series of shows at the intimate (960 seats) Walter Kerr Theater on Broadway in New York City, with the residency concluding February 3rd, 2018. Right, that’s five shows a week, for FOUR MONTHS STRAIGHT! In one way, I view this as insanity on Bruce’s part, in another way I think it’s admirable that Mr. Springsteen – who will turn 68 years old September 23rd – has finally decided to get a steady job.
Bruce Springsteen – as regular patrons of Pencilstorm and my earlier solo blog, Growing Old With Rock & Roll are well aware – is my Number One rock & roll hero of all time, replacing Pete Townshend in that role sometime around September 1978, when Keith Moon died and The Who ran off the rails for good. (But that’s a whole other blog for a whole ‘nother day.)
However, I find it mind-boggling that in his sixth decade on the planet Bruce would think it’s a good idea to play for four months straight in the same theater, night in, night out, night in, night out, etc. etc., ad nauseum. I think Colin would agree that much of the attraction of playing rock & roll shows is traveling around the country with your best friends in a van or a bus or a plane (depending on your level of success in the Rock & Roll Sweepstakes), staying in hotels and eating in different restaurants/fast food places every day. Why Springsteen would choose now to embark on a real job where he’ll carry his lunch bucket & thermos to work every day, punch a clock and play his guitar eludes me.
Even given that Number One Rock & Roll hero business detailed above and taking in the fact I’ve seen every Springsteen tour since Born To Run in 1976, I won’t be attending the shows on Broadway, for a number of reasons:
1) The ticket process was/is incredibly complicated, and I didn’t want to get involved. (Truthfully, I’m just lazy and so damn technologically disempowered that I couldn’t be bothered. I know it’s wrong, and Luddite-like, but I LONG for the days I could just walk into Sears and buy a Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band ticket for the Darkness On The Edge of Town tour. Or camp out overnight at Buzzard’s Nest Records on Morse Road to get a ticket for the Born In The U.S.A. tour. Without one of those campout lines, I would never have met my second-best Bruce Springsteen friend Chris Clinton, and a beautiful friendship in my life would never have happened. And that fact was FAR more important than whatever ticket I got for that tour.)
2) The tickets range in price from $75 to $750 (or thereabouts). I cannot, with a clear conscience, purchase a ticket – even for Bruce Springsteen, my blah-blah-blah Number One Rock & Roll Hero of All Time – for more than I paid for my first Fender Stratocaster back in 1973. And make no mistake, I’m not begrudging my millionaire-many-times-over Rock Hero his cash, more power to him if individuals are willing to pony up that kinda dough, but I cannot – financially or philosophically – participate in that enterprise.
3) If I WERE going to attend the Broadway residency, I would have a hard time deciding WHEN to attend. There’s going to have to be some kind of weird law-of-diminishing-returns arc to the Broadway run, i.e. the first few weeks in October and November, I figure Bruce is going to be easing into the process, refining the show, making it up as he goes along, even within the exacting parameters he has planned his sets by since the very beginnings of his career. Then, by December, I figure things are gonna be HUMMING along: Bruce is gonna have his legs under him, having discerned how to play that 900-seat theater like Chuck Berry ringin’ a bell, things are gonna be cool, life is gonna be good. But then I’m wonderin’ about mid-to-late January: is Springsteen gonna start burnin’ out on going to that Real Job every night, every night, every night? I’d like to think at that tedium-tipping point Bruce might start coming up with Theme Nights: all Wilson Pickett covers one night; all Rolling Stones non-LP b-sides another night; bringing Patti along another night and doing all Steve Lawrence & Edie Gorme, Sonny & Cher, and Serge Gainsboug & Francoise Hardy covers.
Now THAT'S a show I would pay $75 and drive to New York City to see. – Ricki C. / Labor Day, 2017.
Concert Review & Gallery - Steve Earle & The Dukes - Fillmore, Detroit, September 21, 2017 - by Jeremy Porter
Steve Earle is really good at his job. Even if he hadn’t reminded us about three times during the course of his set, we would have known. He brings an air of professionalism, comfort, and yes - work - to the stage. “I’m sure that this is what I was put here to do, and I’m pretty good at it.” he said during an extended soliloquy over the intro to his last song. “I’ve fucked up pretty much everything else I’ve ever done.” he admitted, adding “I’m a pretty good dad.” as an afterthought.
He’s become a bit of a polarizing figure over the years. His fans love his dedication to songwriting, his outspoken politics, and the history around his descent into heroin addiction, resulting in arrests and jail time, and ultimately his recovery and his subsequent return to the stage as one of the most respected and in-demand statesmen of the Americana music scene. There’s also the actor (great smaller roles on HBO’s Treme and The Wire) and the author (Doghouse Roses), adding to the resume of one of America’s greatest musical treasures.
His detractors have a hard time stomaching his intense southern-drawl-delivery, and there is some dichotomy in a hillbilly guitar player from Texas, then Nashville, taking such a hard-left political stance in an industry that generally leans the other way. No doubt many bailed ship when he sobered up and took a more visible place on the soapbox, these days set up right in the heart of liberal Manhattan.
Any naysayers seemed far away at The Fillmore last Thursday night. More often than not a general admission venue, it was a different setting, with folding chairs set up and no standing room. It was clearly an older, mellower crowd, in stark contrast to most of the other shows I’ve seen there. It seemed pleasant and safe, lacking that punk-rock tension I am so familiar with at shows. (Is that a positive?) All things considered, I was open to and happy for the change, and settled in comfortably to enjoy the show.
At 8 pm sharp, Earle came out to introduce the duo of Chris Masterson and his wife Elanor Whitmore - collectively The Mastersons - followed by 30 minutes of their folkrock/americana. The sound was rich & warm and surprisingly full for the 2-piece. as they focused mostly on their new album “Transient Lullaby.” Chris has a distinctive delivery that’s reminiscent of Gary Louris of the Jayhawks (I imagine he tires of hearing that). Elanor’s beautiful harmonies and leads, accompanied by her fiddle playing, blend well with Chris’ voice and guitar, creating a rich depth. They have great songs and an undeniable chemistry.
Exactly 30 minutes later, they came back out for their day jobs as members of The Dukes, with their boss right behind, dressed in jeans and a leather vest, looking more fit and healthy than I’ve seen him, and playing a baby-blue Telecaster Deluxe. They kicked right into the title track of his latest album “So You Wanna be an Outlaw,” an homage to the great country albums of the early-to-mid 70s, specifically the classic “Honky-Tonk Heroes” record by Waylon Jennings. Energy was high and there were smiles all around as he was clearly taking an early stock of the audience, the room, and the sound bouncing around.
The majority of the set was focused on the newer material, which is really strong and well-suited for the seated crowd. "News from Colorado" was an early standout, and one of my favorites from the album. He snuck his first single, "Guitar Town" in there early, with Masterson easily handling the vintage Nashville licks fans have grown accustomed to since it was a top-10 hit in 1986. At about the mid-point, the triple whammy of Copperhead Road > Tanneytown > Hardcore Troubadour was unleashed to the delight of the crowd, who were now on their feet. For any newbies, Copperhead Road is probably his best-known song, and like Tanneytown, a great visual narrative that is backed by gritty guitar work and ascending dramatic delivery. If you’re looking, both are great places to start.
When you walk into a Steve Earle show, you know going in that the music isn’t the only thing you’re going to get. He has something to say, and he’ll make damn sure he gets it out. His banter can be dark & self-assessing or charged & political, and often delivered with a dry, humorous punchline. He touched on everything from the hurricanes, earthquakes and fires we’re seeing in North America, to the “orangutan” we elected as president last November, to his realization that he’s ultimately a romantic in every sense of the word. It got particularly deep and personal as he pondered the recent end of his seventh marriage and how he may eventually have to face the fact that there just might not be someone out there for everyone. If it came across like a therapy session, the audience was right there on the couch with him, enjoying the revealing look into the head that wrote all those great songs.
Yeah, Steve Earle is really good at his job, and there was a certain feeling that he was at work during the show, but not in the way some miserable rock stars obviously phone it in and just want to get it over with. He treats it like work, with a full comprehension around the expectations of the product he’s being paid to deliver. But he loves this job, and never for one moment seemed to be going through the motions. He came across as sincere, gracious and engaged, focused and determined. His work ethic resulted in a quality couple hours of great art, and we walked away feeling thoroughly fulfilled. Seeing someone like Steve Earle, who is 30+ years into a music career, and enjoying the new stuff as much as the old stuff, and witnessing a master at his craft, is a gift. Just pro in every way.
Steve Earle's new album So You Wanna Be An Outlaw is available now! It's a fantastic collection of bluesy rock and roll, traditional country rock, and honest Americana. One of the best of the year!
~~~
Jeremy Porter lives near Detroit and fronts the rock and roll band Jeremy Porter And The Tucos. Follow them on Facebook to read his road-blog chronicling their adventures and see his photo series documenting the disgusting bathrooms in the dives they play. He's a whiskey snob, an unapologetic fan of "good" metal, and couldn't really care less about the UofM - OSU rivalry since he once saw The Stones at the Horseshoe. Still, go blue.
www.thetucos.com
www.facebook.com/jeremyportermusic
@jeremyportermi
www.rockandrollrestrooms.com
Pencilstorm Interview: Columbus' Armada
Columbus' Armada will play one of its final shows this Saturday, Sept. 30 at King Avenue 5 rock and sports bar at 9:00pm. The Buckeyes will be on the TVs with a killer soundtrack provided by Armada. Pencilstorm sat down with Armada's lead singer, Wal Ozello, to find out more about the show and the band.
Tell me about how Armada met and your first gig?
Steve and Ted met in high school at Worthington and played in a band called Signals, inspired by their love of Rush. Steve and I met at a bar called Jousters on North Campus where BW3s is now and hit it off when he found out I was a singer. Ted and Dave knew each other from church of all places, but Ted knew Dave played a killer guitar. We all had a love of complex and rocking music like Rush, Journey, Triumph and Tesla. We clicked from day one. Our first gig was opening up for Zaza at the Alrosa Villa on a Sunday night. Sundays were commonly known as employee nights since that’s really all who were in the audience. But it was our first show and a ton of people came out to see us. We had this eclectic group of fans. Dave was well known at the Alrosa so many of the regulars came out to see him. Ted and Steve had their followers from the Signal days and were in a Fraternity on campus. I knew a bunch of people from OSU that drove out for the show, plus a few friends came down from Cleveland. We asked all of our fans to leave the stage after the show and head up to the bar area so Rick would know how many of our fans showed up. Needless to say, after we played our set the floor was empty but the bar was packed. Rick seemed to love us so it was off to the races after that.
Eventually you guys were headlining weekends at the Alrosa Villa which is no small feat. How did you get to that point? What did those fans dig about you guys?
After the first opening gig with Zaza we played a Friday/Saturday opening with a band called Sgt. Roxx from Chicago. After two opening gigs, Rick started us as headliners. Rumor has it that Armada was the quickest band to go from openers to headliners in the history of the Alrosa. I think it was because we were doing stuff no one else was. People came out to see us play Rush, note for note, followed by Journey and Tesla along with originals that were a mix of all three styles. We brought in such different fans that it was crazy. I’d look out in the audience to see some long-hair leather jacket wearing Alrosa regular rocking out next to a campus sorority girl in an ΑΧΩ shirt dancing to Any Way You Want It. It was insane. We really fed off the crowd and it became about making sure they were having a good time and forgetting about the bullshit of life for two hours. That’s what a real rock show should be about – forgetting about your troubles and enjoying life. That’s what I think people dug the most.
Unlike many bands from that scene, you guys also played originals and cut some records. Did Armada ever have any labels sniffing around considering signing the band?
We released our first album, Don’t Give Up The Ship, in 1992. It was a mix of our best originals. Some leaned more towards Progressive Rock, some leaned more towards Mtv Hard Rock. The guys from Dream Theater loved our sound when we opened for them during their Images and Words tour. We were able to get Don’t Give Up The Ship in front of a few A&R guys but never got any traction. The reality was that a year earlier Nirvana had released Nevermind and Smells Like Teen Spirit was huge. In shuffled the Seattle sound and everything remotely connected with Hard Rock went in the trash. It was the only era in rock history where no one was looking for that high tenor voice like Geddy Lee, Rik Emmett or Steve Perry. Five years earlier or later, we might have had our chance but in 1992 is was not meant to be.
Did you ever imagine standing onstage at the Alrosa Villa in 1992 you would be taking the stage with the same band in 2017?
Yes. I did. I knew we had magic going on. It was more than the music. We were four guys that wanted to make the best music while making sure our fans had a blast during our shows. Plus, we had each other’s backs. Always. It’s great we can make some awesome music that fans love and come out to see us over and over again. Eventually, Armada became very much like a family. We’re all brothers. One of the songs on Don’t Give Up The Ship is called Blood Brothers which we wrote about us. The chorus ends, “Blood Brothers… and friends to the end.” There will always be an Armada to me. I can’t imagine life without it.
Armada will be playing a mix of their originals and covers by Rush, Journey, Guns N Roses, Motley Crue, Whitesnake, Ozzy Osbourne and more this Saturday, September 30 at 9:00pm at King Avenue 5 in Grandview Hts. Check out the details here.
